PART ONE: BASIC INTRODUCTION
Q: Very nice to meet you Prof. Bearman. My supervisor Prof. Xiling WANG is now organizing a set of interviews on social science research methods aim at helping to introduce more about methods to Chinese college students for free. We all know that you are the world’s expert on social network analysis. It is our honor to have you here tell us something about this field. Thank you very much. First of all, what do you think is social network analysis?
A: well, social network analysis is one level a way of thinking about the world. So it is a way of imagining the world as connected by relations, and that’s a conceptual way of thinking that the world is connected. And then social network analysis is a set of technics and methods to describe those connections and to review the ways in which the structures that bands people together, band people to groups, band groups to each other. The set of methods to review how that happens. So it’s both a set of concepts and a set of methods.
Q: So what’s the difference between this way of thinking with other ways?
A: I think in typical social science approaches, people approach the world as the units of observations who are independent of each other. So they imagine they can learn something about people by abstracting them out of their social (connections), out of their families, out of their communities, out of their work places, out of what setting they are, and asking them questions. Social Network Analysis can learn something about people we have to actually embed them in those settings, to understand the relational precious that are on them, the opportunities that they are given by virtue of other relations with other people. So it’s pretty profound difference between thinking that the way we are to try to understand the world is as if they were independent as versus saying the way we want to understand who we are, what we hope for, what’s possible is my focusing on the relationships that we have with other people.
Q: Can you tell us an example to learn to think like a networker.
A: I think structurally. So it is the same kind of principle if you are interested in something. You don’t study it, you study it in how it is embedded in a larger world. So, for example, let’s take taxes, we have been studying what’s the meaning of one word people use to say taxes. The meaning of a word, what a word means, is depended on words around it. So, if I say, the word “batter”, batter is both someone who hits a ball, and it is also the material that you made pancakes or cakes. Or I say “strike” it is both an accrual throw and an activity that labor dose, they don’t go to work, they strike. So these are obvious examples that the meaning of the word is conditional on the words that around it. If I know that batter is associate with pancake or cakes, I know oh that’s what that means. If I know batter is associate with a ball, I know what that means. Much more complexity in any kind of the speech that meaning of a concept like equality, freedom, and so on is can change depending on what are the other concepts that are around it. So, thinking in terms of network is, I am not going to study what equality means, I am going to see what is around equality, as a concept. I am not going to study what this person is, I am going to see what is around them, that’s always when you are trying to abstract the setting in which is the person is impacted. It is to pry the major level context in which a person is touched. So I am interested in students I want to put them in the universities. I want to understand the universities not understand the students. So I am trying to get the context. But it is not any context, it is a relational context.
PART TWO: HISTRY AND FUTURE
Q: When did you start to use this method?
A: I was a PhD student in 1981, at Harvard University, but even before that in the 1977, I worked as an undergraduate student, I work on a problem that was a very classic social network problem which was, in America we have major companies that control the economy, the top 500 companies of the united states, and each one of those companies has a board of directors, individuals who direct them, and those individual direct multiple companies, and I was interested in the dual network that I rose from the fact that all individual sat on company boards, and you could ask how our companies connected by the overlap of their directors. So I was interested in the structure of the US company.
Q: That is when I first know about the Social Network Analysis, the typical company network example.
A: the structure of the corporation net, yeah, that is quite what I did in 1970s, my work have not been published since I was just an undergraduate, and then, when I went to Harvard I learned more about Social Network Analysis, with the guy named Harrison White who was my tutor, he is still alive, he is really one of the founders of Social Network Analysis. So he invented what we talked about earlier block modeling, and he invented a whole bunch of some other things, so when people think about social networks, he is the father of many of the ideas that we work with. Also many of the people you might have heard of who do Social Network Analysis, like Mark Granovetter, who wrote the paper we called the strength of weak ties, which shows the weak ties, he was a student of Harrison white’s. So many of Harrison white’s student have gone on to field in Social Network Analysis, I think I have cheered 50 doctoral students, some of those people are very important in Social Networks, more than me.
Q: Tell us more about the development of this method.
A: Social Network Analysis starts in a field called sociometry, which is a way just based on just looking at a collection of people, maybe people who lived in a village, or people who attend to funeral, just drawing a picture of their relationships, representing the circles in the relationship there is the edge. So it starts from the idea that anthropologists had to try to graph the clique to describe the community. And it was a field that didn’t have any measurement, so what happened from 1970 to 1980 to the present is, increasing sophistication in measurement, so we are now able to think about a concept like power, and say what would power look like in a network. And we have now measures for different ways in which power could be expressed. Power could be how uniquely between two people you are, and we then call them betweenness centrality; power could just be a share number of people who look up to you, that’s degree centrality. But, one of the things that we have been talking about is how the micro-processes that lead people to form a tie or to dissolve the tie, to make a friendship or end a friendship, to make a sign to treaty or not to sign to a treaty. So those process are understandable with respect to very simple rescission rules, like avoid relationships that are designate, that are contradictory.
PART THREE: HOT TOPICS
Q: You mentioned before that you are currently using this method to analysis the . Will you please introduce us some basic thoughts about this research?
A: The basic thought, first is that the semantic structure is meaningful you know that the way in which words are organized in texts is meaningful. And we can review that. That’s the new idea.
Q: Then tell us about the small world theory briefly.
A: Everybody thinks they live in a small world. So, the small world is the world we live in is super large, it’s a world that only exist when there is lots of people. And it has two characters one is that the average path lines, the average number steps between any two randomly select people is very small. And that people live or people are in very clustered communities. These things seem contradictory that half lines will be short and yet people are in clustered communities. So the small world problem is how do those two things happen at the same time. And the work that shows how the happen at the same time was what Duncan Watts did years ago. And that’s what makes it interesting. Like I bet you are 5 steps away from
the present of your country.
Q: They said it is now from 6 steps to 4 steps already.
A: Yeah, so it is getting smaller. I’m sure that’s probably true if you took two randomly people this would basicly be true. Actually it is interesting now because we have met, you are now 4 steps away from Barack Obama, my wife, my wife’s friend, Obama. And now it’s you, me, my wife, my wife’s friend, Obama.
It is only meaningful if you have hundreds of thousands of nodes. It’s perfect for China.
Q: How about relationship change over time, how can we measure that?
A: Relation changes over time. It looks different patterns on the network. So, the meaning of the relationship is the pattern of the network. One of the ways you can tell if the meaningful of a relationship that change over time is network patterns change. Of course you could also go the other way and say we could look at a relationship like trust and say that the structure of trust is much different than it used be, then we learn something about trust. So networks give you a way of actually capture important changes that we don’t often see.
PART FOUR: PRACTICE QUESTIONS
Q: Do you use other methods in your research?
A: Oh, sure. Everybody wants to be able to show that, you want to be able to treat a network characteristic as an independent variable. And some did vary in the individual level. And that’s important for outcomes. So, people take network data, turn it into individual level or people level variable for an inner regression, use the standard statistical methods to predict something. So, there is no reason that network cannot fit that strategy. Almost all of my work, uses networks try to show something, by some other methods. So, we use spatial methods, spatial the geography, we use ordinary regression, like linear modeling which is a subset of regression. So, I don’t think there is a method that I don’t use.
Q: So it belongs to quantitative method?
A: They are generally quantitative. While, you know, they don’t have to be.
Q: Can this be a mixed method?
A: We do a lot of mixed methods, you collect network data, you generate a plot of that data, you visualize it, you get to see it. You don’t need the statistical way to be able to describe those networks. You can just say, you know you can describe them qualitatively. You can draw your qualitatively understanding to make sense of them. Statistics are just that kind of thing that people use to, make it appears in the argument are better.
Q: Then can this be qualitative?
A: But I think you can be very qualitative with network data. Network data is very theory construction. So, if you have some network data, it helps you to get better theories. The courses I teach in Columbia, I teach social theory. That’s what I teach.
Q: Like your book ?
A: That’s anthropography. I use some of the ideas of social network analysis in that book. About how people get jobs, which is a network process. But the book is only little bit of networks. Some other kinds of observations. There are other kinds of, there is a chapter on networks about how people get jobs. A chapter on queueing theory which, queueing like standing in line, there is a chapter on statistic process, so, different methods motivated different chapters.
PART FIVE: RECOMMENDATIONS
Q. Give us some recommendationS on choosing text books.
A：I think there is a book in 1994 by Wasserman and Faust. Called . That’s excellent on methods. Until 1994. So all the methods that are developed worked out for 1994, W&F is the best. Then I think after 1994, to 2012, maybe this book is written by Matthew and Jackson, . Then I think a very simple book for beginners, is John Scott’s book, for beginners. Looks like a good book. I will start with John Scott, and then if I got more other interests I go to other books.
1. Statistical: Matthew and Jackson
2. Theoretical: John Scott
3. Methods: Wasserman and Faust
Q. Thank you for accepting my interview! Thanks a lot!
